Wednesday, January 6, 2016

Sanders' Campaign Deserves Our Attention

Bernie
Sanders and Hillary Clinton are in town tonight. The Sanders campaign
called me today to remind me about our impending caucus. The Iowa caucus
and the New Hampshire primary are just around the corner.

Americans
are on the cusp of an important primary election involving important choices.
These choices could be historic, too. Because more than any other
candidate in any recent election, the candidacy of Bernie Sanders represents an
opportunity to chart a new course. Like candidates in the Republican
Party, Sanders has tapped into discontent: discontent with the conduct of our
foreign policy; discontent with a flailing economic system; and discontent with
a broken political process.

But
unlike his rivals in the Democratic Party, and unlike the Republicans, Sanders
offers a series of alternatives in each of these arenas that are consistent,
tested, moral, and just.

While
Sanders' foreign policy needs serious fleshing out, and while I think he has
missed a real opportunity to overturn a toxic consensus in this area, he
nonetheless represents the best option out there. Unlike Clinton and the
Republicans, Sanders recognizes that many of the dangers lurking in the world
are of our own making and require the modification of our behavior as well as
that of others. Unlike Clinton and the Republicans, Sanders recognizes
that savage military force is a blunt instrument that can prove not only
immoral, but also rebounds and heightens our own insecurity.

When it
comes to domestic policy, Sanders shares the populist critique of some
Republican candidates and Hillary Clinton. But unlike the latter, he has
not flip-flopped on these issues, and is more trustworthy. Nor has he
taken buckets of cash from Wall Street. And unlike the Republicans,
Sanders' populism is rooted in a clear-eyed assessment of where fault lies and
what the responsibilities of the state are in rectifying that fault.
Donald Trump can inveigh all he likes against a rigged system. But
I'd urge any of his supporters to peruse his tax plan: it equates to savings
for the wealthy and a greater burden for the rest of us.

Like
the Republican reformers of the early twentieth century, Sanders recognizes the
importance of preventing capital from growing to such a size and amassing such
a power that it subverts democratic governance. Through Republican
legislators and Supreme Court justices, plutocrats have already seized an
outsized role for themselves in funding and therefore compromising our
elections. Sanders' promise to dismantle flawed institutions on Wall
Street and re-draw the lines of economic power to favor the working and middle
class are a far cry from the Republicans' promise to put their trust in the
fiction of the free market, and far more trustworthy than Clinton's promises
given that voters will inevitably wonder what she has said behind closed doors
to her funders on Wall Street.

The
vision of the U.S. promoted by Sanders is also more compatible with reality
and

We live
in a society full of people from around the world who have been in the U.S. for
varying amounts of time, from months to many generations. Those people
possess various faiths, various points of view, speak various languages, and
are of various ethnicities. Their faiths and freedoms are protected by
law. So when Republican candidates attempt to demonize entire groups, and
to hold them selectively responsible for the actions of people with whom they
share a single characteristic on the other side of the world, they are
violating the letter and the spirit of that law. When they seek to turn
old migrants against new, the country against the town, and the middle class
against itself, they are assaulting the foundations of our society.
Sanders embraces our country's people as they are, not as they were in
the 18th century.

But he
is not content with the lot of those people. And in articulating
alternatives, he draws on a variety of inspirations. In some cases, those
are our country's own traditions: radicals of the mountain and pacific west;
the populists of the depression-era south; socialists and social reformers from
the eastern seaboard; and progressives from the midwest. Those were
people with visions of a better, more equal society. They were all, in
their own ways, prepared to contribute more knowing that those contributions
would be multiplied because they would be required from each person in
proportion to the wealth that had accrued to them in the course of their life
in our society.

Many of
those visions went un-realized, but Sanders' other inspirations are those in
other parts of the world who won better standards of living, more freedoms, and
more secure lives than those many Americans enjoy: the social democrats of
Scandinavia; the progressives of Canada; the labor movement in Britain.
These are existing and successful societies, where the social democracy
that Sanders embraces have brought not the calamity Republicans predict, but
stability and prosperity, imperfect but very, very real.

I hope
that traditional Democrats will consider voting or caucusing for Sanders, and
that Republicans dissatisfied with the status quo will listen to his words,
un-filtered by the degraded mainstream media and the right-wing propaganda
machine.

My
adopted state, Nevada, is plagued by serial poverty that leaves its elites
unmoved. Its legislature is run by representatives of a party who range
from economic fundamentalists bound by pledges to outright sociopaths who have
expressed a desire to murder refugees. Its economy is warped by the power
of protected industries that believe themselves exempt from the obligations of
our civil society. And our social infrastructure is pathetically
threadbare, scarcely worthy of the ambitions of our communities, who struggle
to make ends meet, to find good schools, and to make new lives.

The movement Sanders is building, the program he would bring to
Washington, and his assessment of the problems our nation faces and the
culprits behind those problems make his campaign worthy of support. He
represents our best chance of obliterating the combination of injustice,
inequality, and disempowerment that plagues our society, and replacing it with
something fairer and more equal and more democratic. Other candidates
propose to entrench the existing system, while others would fiddle around the
edges. But if Sanders can take his movement to Washington, we can use his
coattails to make change in our states, our communities, and our day to day
lives.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research.